1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to the field of vehicles (notably, motor vehicles), lighting, and signaling. The invention relates to, more specifically, a device for signaling lights of a motor vehicle that is designed and arranged so that the device can be incorporated into both the door to the luggage compartment or tailgate and into the lower part and/or at least one of the peripheral parts of the windshield of the motor vehicle while advantageously leaving the device itself or a part thereof transparent so that it can be seen through.
2. Description of Related Art
Motor-vehicle signaling lights perform various lighting and signaling functions. They are fixed to the external structure of the vehicle (both at the front and rear thereof) and/or, in part, on the door to the luggage compartment or tailgate of the vehicle.
In practice, several of the front-signaling optical devices are generally fixed underneath or beside the headlamps and even, increasingly often, in a substantially same horizontal plane thereof, but offset toward the rear of the vehicle in substantially almond-shaped housings. These devices take up a not-insignificant amount of space through which the driver of the vehicle has absolutely no visibility.
The lights grouped together in this way are, notably, the turn-signal indicators or flashing lights, fog lights, position lights, parking lights, reversing lights, hazard-warning lights, and daytime-running lights.
In the case of the rear lights, which may also include retro-reflectors, the regulations forbid photometric functions from being sited on the door and luggage-compartment-opening leaves or tailgates unless those functions are present on the fixed parts of the vehicle because the devices sited on the leaves are intended only to take over should the same functions provided on the fixed parts become defective.
The most commonplace solution is, therefore, to transfer all of the rear optical devices of the vehicle away from the door to the luggage compartment, thus necessarily limiting the width thereof. Another solution that has become widespread is to divide the optical units into two (one part remaining on the bodywork of the vehicle while the remaining portion is fixed to the door to the luggage compartment), but this makes these optical units more complicated to fit and to connect-up.
Attempts have also been made at tackling the problem of motor-vehicle-tailgate or -luggage-compartment-door-opening width in other ways.
Thus, EP 1 031 462 proposes locating all of the rear lighting components at the corners of the vehicle such that the lighting components still project the light toward the rear even when the door to the luggage compartment or the tailgate is up.
FR 2 859 443 proposes, to make the bodywork parts of the motor vehicles visible without the need for lighting elements and an electric-power supply, the use of a light-emitting film bonded to the motor-vehicle-bodywork component concerned, possibly with transparent external protection as well.
FR 2 933 665 describes a motor-vehicle rear-luggage-compartment flap provided with at least one cutout to render at least partially visible an optical unit fixed to the structure of the vehicle. As an option, this cutout may correspond to a transparent central part of the optical unit the lighting elements of which may then be light-emitting diodes facing toward the outside and arranged in a ring around an empty central zone. This empty central zone is empty of any lighting component and allows the driver to increase his visibility in this direction (known as “the three-quarters rear visibility”). The technical and industrial constraints generated by such cutouts and the intimate marrying of the optical unit fixed to the structure with the cutout made in the door to the luggage compartment or the tailgate have put the brakes on the development of such a solution, which also finds itself compromised by difficulties in obtaining a perfect seal between the optical unit that has to be visible from the outside and the cutout that has to be at least partially in register therewith.
As far as the signaling lamps situated at the front of motor vehicles are concerned, the current solutions are relatively limited, and all of them are bulky.